Presently, many home owners and businesses contract with multiple service providers for the telephone, video and data services they need. Having several different types of interfaces to the various classes of services is common. For example, a business may have one set of phone lines for telephone services, a coax interface for video services, and a wide area network interface for data services. The emergence of broadband networks is changing this situation by allowing all of the classes of services to be available to the customers through a single broadband network interface.
The bundling of services on the broadband networks has created a challenge to match delivery of services with the customers' entitlements. Historically, different service providers have used different methods to control customer access to services. For example, cable companies provide video services by sending the entire suite of channels to all of the customers all of the time. The customer then receives only those channels that they have paid for by means of special equipment at the customers location that filters out the non-contracted channels. A cable company changes the channel entitlement by either replacing or reprogramming the equipment at the customer's site. Data service companies control customer access to services at their end of the interface. The customers link their computers to the service provider's computers typically using a cable modem. Without changing the cable modem, the service provider can alter the services the customer may access by issuing new instructions to its own computers. Since the service providers control the interfaces to the customers, they can control the access to the services any way they want.
Inserting a broadband network between the service providers and the customers shifts the burden of controlling customer access to the services on the broadband network. For example, customers who wish to activate a new video service must contact their video service provider of choice to establish the entitlements. The service provider then makes the new video service available to the broadband network along with a circuit identification of the customers who are entitled to receive it. The broadband network then routes the new video service only to those network ports that interface to the entitled customers. This approach requires the broadband network manager to understand which ports are entitled to which services and control them from the network side accordingly. However, no standard mechanism is currently in place that allows the service providers to inform the network manager which ports are entitled to which services.